Irish Artist Builds the World’s First 1.4 Billion Euro Home From Shredded Bills

What makes a home worth a million dollars? How about a billion dollars? Irish artist Frank Buckley has taken this question to its logical extreme by building his very own home made from 1.4 billion Euro notes! Graced with very strict permission from the Central Bank of Ireland, Buckley has constructed and now lives in a home made entirely of shredded decommissioned Euros. He formed the bills into 6 inch by 2 inch bricks, each of which contains around 40 to 50 thousand Euros. The three-room house is an amazing exercise in recycled materials as well as a social statement on Ireland’s housing and financial crisis.

Like many of his countrymen, Buckley fell victim to the national construction boom that led to Ireland’s financial problems, eventually warranting a bailout from the European Union. In the 2000s he received a 365,000 Euro loan to buy a house, despite being unemployed. These “maddening” credit loans are what Buckley believes drove the country into the ground.

When faced with having to downsize, the artist did the unthinkable and began to construct his euro bill apartment in an abandoned office building in Dublin. The home now has three rooms — a bedroom, a bathroom and a living room with gallery space for his other works. Each room is outfitted with leftover shredded euro floors. With Ireland’s notoriously brutal winters, Buckley says the tightly packed bills keep him so warm, he sleeps without a blanket. “Whatever you say about the Euro” hey says, “it’s a great insulator.”